TGIF — Now Tidy Up Your Desk

It's Friday and the weekend is finally here. To keep your work life from cluttering up your weekend, tidy up your desk right now. Organizing your work, before leaving the office for two days, will not only help clear your mind from work worries and make room for weekend fun, but it will give you a jump start on Monday morning, too.
Take a little time right now to stack your papers into tidy piles. Organize them while you are at it, too. Clean around your keyboard with some compressed air. Put all your pens in a cup. Throw away any little bits of refuse and wipe down your desk — experts claim that around 10 million bacteria make their home on your desk. Not all bacteria is dangerous, but things could get nasty if you eat at your desk.

I truly believe leaving a tidy desk behind me at the office gives me peace of mind over the weekend. I'm going to start stacking my papers right now. How about you?

I clean my desk/lab bench up every day, actually. There are so many opportunities for germs to get on things that we have to wipe everything down every single day with antibacterial bleach solution. I also organize all our test requisitions and make sure there is enough media stocked up for the overnight people that do the emergency cases.

Great tip, Fit! I started doing that a few weeks ago, and the difference it made to my Monday morning is incredible! I now stop about 20 mins early and start clearing and cleaning my desk, flagging up email reminders for Monday and making a thorough list of every little things I'll have to do then. Since I started doing that, I've been able to switch my brain off during the weekend, instead of suddenly waking up in the middle of the night thinking "oh I have to send that file to that person!" And coming back to a clean, empty desk makes me a bit less grumpy!

I don't really have a desk to work on...but I'm organizing all my visible surfaces!
I borrowed a bunch of organizing books from the library, and they also suggest doing quick roundups like this for other areas to corral the clutter [sounds like a rodeo!]